Bluestone Lane founder Nicholas Stone answers your questions.

The inspiration for Bluestone Lane came from growing up and living in Melbourne, Australia. That really underpinned the necessity to create this company. When I moved to the States in 2010, I couldn’t believe how different the coffee culture was. In Australia, it’s a very independent, driven model, where chains traditionally in the coffee space haven’t done well. And there’s been a real revolution in coffee, where it moved away from being a functional beverage solving a need for caffeine towards an artisan pursuit, creating spaces in a very individual, personalized way, and leveraging the high quality produce you can find in Australia, a country the size of the United States but with the population of Texas, 25 million people.

We wanted to showcase high quality, clean, sophisticated breakfast and lunch fare. And moving to the States, I thought Starbucks has been so incredibly successful introducing coffee, serving people efficiently and quickly, but it was missing the personalization that was at the forefront in Australia, so that’s what inspired the idea - bringing something I was used to at home to New York. That underpinned the whole concept. I’d never worked a day in hospitality, but I thought I’d do my best, having worked at that stage in Financial Services, and having a place where I could go, where I felt like a local, not a customer, where they knew my name, face, and order, being recognized, having everything personalized, there seemed to be a need where there were a lot of other people like me. I observed this in other sectors like manicure and pedicure places, or wash and fold - people had their local places, but they didn’t have that for coffee, and I thought that was strange!

In Australia, we’re incredibly loyal to our hair cut places, our coffee places, our pubs. So I thought there was a great opportunity to bring something more elevated. And the name is synonymous for the intricate laneways you find in the Melbourne business district. They are laden with cobblestone, blue stones. It wasn’t a reference to my surname. Melbourne is known for its laneways, particularly the street art, coffee shops, and oftentimes only locals know about them. So a few years later, here we are!

I remember the first time I heard of Australian coffee culture: I was visiting the UK in 2014 I believe, and there was a publication that had Australian baristas onsite, and I remember being intrigued. What does Australian coffee culture mean to you?

Australian coffee culture to me really focuses on a couple of things. First of all, it’s about human connection. It’s about facilitating connection between people. When you go inside and you feel recognized by the staff, it’s reciprocal - I know you, and you know me. And that’s the beauty of Australian coffee culture, it’s anchored in a localized personalized reciprocal relationship. And it’s premium and artisan - it’s not only a focus on premium coffee and tea, but also the food, the design. Starbucks failed in Australia, because Australians love this independent bespoke curation. I think it’s very sophisticated, and the standard is a perfectly made flat white. It’s not an exception, it’s the rule.

Good coffee is found in every town. It’s not just mass urban areas, or particular pockets. It’s the standard. It’s not a land built on drip coffee at all. The standard is espresso coffee, on premise. Australians see coffee as an experience, where they are recognized. And they also use coffee to facilitate social connection and to catch up. It’s transitioned from meeting at the pub after work to socializing over coffee and healthy foods, and that’s consistent with what millennials are interested in. Rather than once a week having dinner, they’d rather see more friends during the day.

I’d say there’s a couple of key themes. One is the Australian community within NYC has acted as a catalyst, introducing Australian coffee culture, this focus on premium food and sincere dedication to service, and then combined with that you have such a core number of young professionals who are looking for a more balanced way of living, these daily escapes. And we have such a critical concentration of our customers in New York City.

These people driving these movements forward are these younger demographics, they want more curated experiences, more personalized experiences, to walk in and feel more local. And thirdly, New York’s density is pretty incredible, and it’s the biggest brand the world’s ever known. It’s bigger than Apple, or Nike - NYC is the center of art, commerce, fashion. It’s the epicenter of so many cultural institutions.

If you can harness the power and provide something that a lot of people are interested in accessing daily, then it can catapult and magnify what you’re creating. And with Bluestone Lane, we had the Australian support, a customer that was underserved, and leveraging the incredible density and power of the New York City brand.

Absolutely. With Husk, it’s very much coming soon. The first stage will be launching direct to consumer commerce in the next few weeks. We looked at the gluten-free allergen community, and we saw there wasn’t a lot of variety, or products with very high quality ingredients. A lot of the products out there have a lot of fillers, or not nutritional ingredients. It took us a while to find the master baker to bring it to life. My wife studied a lot in the space, she has a background in biomedical science and nutrition, so she’s very health oriented, and has a huge focus on well-being. And that’s translated through to Bluestone Lane, but as it relates to HUSK, she’s a huge driver and a cofounder of that company.

We found our creative genius in Melbourne, after scouring the world and looking for people. There’s a lot of people who bake gluten-free at home, but that's difficult to scale. We were very fortunate to meet Tesha Borin, and it was just so serendipitous we found each other. It was 2017, and my wife was pregnant, and we were at a cafe in Melbourne that had won a design award for best cafe design that year, and as we were paying the bill, she was still hungry, so she tried these gluten-free raw vegan chocolate bars. And she couldn’t believe how good they were. So we found out about Tesha - it was so serendipitous that we found her the next day, we had to meet the next morning, and we were just blown away. I knew on the first meeting she was the one. It’s an exciting opportunity for us. Husk is small and on the side, but should be a real company this year, and we’ll be targeting direct to consumer and premium grocery in the first stages.

Terrific question. What you’re seeing on the West Coast is a lot more focus on leveraging the surf, the water, elements tied to the coast in Australia, akin to Sydney's aesthetic. And in New York, you’re seeing elements akin to the aesthetic you’d find in Melbourne.

We curate every space, so no two Bluestones are the same. They are tied together with color and material palette, but no 2 Bluestones look the same. That adds complexity from an operational standpoint, but it keeps it unique and bespoke, so everyone has their own Bluestone Lane. And that’s important to us. It’s really unique about our model and something we take great pride in, that everything’s different.

Even though we have uniformity in everything our locals really love, like the taste of our product, the service size, the elements they want bespoke and personalized, their relationships with our locals and the aesthetic of the space and how people utilize it - some spaces put more emphasis on dining, the cafe concept, or the escape concept of a kiosk where you can walk in and feel recognized and special, where doesn’t need to be a longer visit but a nanosecond of human connection that makes people feel important, which is just accelerating in this digital age.

People spend more time on devices, less time socializing human-to-human, and so it’s very important for people to socialize with others. It’s where our predisposition lies. And even as technologies provides this mass ability to communicate, there still needs to be this notion of people spending time together. I want to be a bit of a contrarian in that sense, that we keep people together, human to human, rather than just virtually.

It’s always going to be a challenge. But for us, we wanted to focus on developing people’s careers, not just hobby jobs. So a big part of it is having a development framework where people understand they can develop in the organization. We’re not perfect at it, it’s probably one of the biggest areas for improvement for us in the organization, but we're developing the Bluestone Laneways program launching in May where we’ll be committing to developing business leaders, and having a very prescriptive development program.

I think it’s so interesting that very few people manage a business that turns over $1 million dollars, and the opportunity to do that, to run a store that makes a difference to 1,000 people or more a day, I think it gets undersold, under-appreciated. And for us, that’s a huge message that we want people to appreciate, and we want our team to understand that it’s a terrific achievement.

You have to be focusing on 3 key leaders: purpose, why Bluestone Lane exists, why we make a difference, why we provide a genuine daily escape. Part of that is mastery, so constantly training, developing, and mastering. And then beyond hospitality, how to coach a team, how to develop people. And autonomy, for us that’s really about ownership, taking ownership of their small business, and thinking intellectually and critically about how they can drive performance, developing their team, while using tools in the Bluestone Lane system. Lastly, encouraging people to own their own career, knowing their role and executing it. It’s something you have to focus on all the time. The gig economy has made it really hard to retain talent, when you’re dealing with a regular schedule. But then a lot of gig economy jobs don’t have a team aspect to it, and the most critical component to be successful we see is that you have to LOVE working with other people - enjoying being on a team - and they must love serving other people, making them feel good and happy. If that’s missing, it’s hard to be successful at Bluestone Lane.

Ultimately, Bluestone Lane is about being part of a pure definition of hospitality, and for us, it’s about providing it to our locals every single day. We’re built on local retention. We’re built on serving the same locals. And that’s how it is for successful coffee businesses internationally, serving your same customer regularly. And you can only do that if your commitment to service is great. If the service is ordinary, it’s getting more difficult to sustain that. I know I expected a lot more when I moved to New York, I wanted premium service. The service must be premium and engaging. It’s a non-negotiable.

Haha! You know, I think you need to respect the boundaries between personal and professional. We’ve struggled to do that at times. I certainly haven’t left it at the door. But you learn a lot about each other working in a business together, living together. I think that it’s really being aligned in purpose of the company, and being respectful to the roles that either of you play.

Alexandra’s done a wonderful job in supporting me leading Bluestone Lane, providing injections of inspiration, that core DNA when we need it, when we’re confused. And she also gives me such an incredible sounding board, because she’s still so close to the movement, she can provide those salient messages and views that only someone who really understands the core, the purpose of the brand, and what we stand for. I’m so grateful for that, because I can come home, have a complicated question, a lot of people will try to address it but they won’t understand the influence from the Australian coffee culture, how it translates to the US, and she can decipher that, providing glimpse that have helped the company immensely. She’ll always remain helpful with Bluestone Lane.

And she’s being such a big driver of needing to do something different, providing better quality products, and now looking forwards allergen-free, she’s a big driver of the whole business, and that’s something where it’s small but exciting. And with Tesha, she has a great relationship, which is critical considering Tesha moved from Australia to the States to bring it to life.

There’s no linear answer to how it works, but you gotta respect the boundaries, and the role, and at times, I have to stop talking about Bluestone Lane, just put it down, and that’s hard for me. I’m the one who’s been most challenging with separating personal and professional, especially when it comes to home life.

As an entrepreneur, you’re always thinking about the business, how to improve, the great elements and the elements you don’t have answers for, which is the risk. And it’s an intoxicating experience, being an entrepreneur, a small business owner who’s trying to grow really quickly. That’s how I think of myself. You can never just switch off. You just care about it so much, you have a lot of repetitional risk, a lot of financial risk, a lot of responsibility for our locals, our team of 650 people now, our communities we serve - we pride ourselves on being a core part of the community. So it’s never just a binary “flip the switch.”

I think for us, Australian coffee culture is around espresso coffee, because we’re a land of immigrants. Pre and post WWII there was a huge amount of migration from Western Europe - Italy, Greece, Malta, and they brought their espresso heritage, and that injected coffee into the Australian scene. Australia as part of the Commonwealth had a very big tea culture, and with Italians arriving with their espresso machines, drip coffee wasn’t a part of the landscape.

So for us, most of the innovation is on the espresso side, with a movement towards flat whites, it originated from New Zealand and Australia, and the fact that it’s now recognized by Starbucks and added to the core menu, that’s a testament to the Australian and New Zealand coffee culture.

Our coffee needs to be premium, it needs to taste fantastic, so we spend a lot of time sourcing incredible quality arabica coffee. The quality of machines has to be very premium, we are sourcing from Italian manufacturers, European manufacturers. And a lot of skill goes into making coffee consistently, especially with 3-4 kinds of milk, it’s not like opening a bottle of beer. That’s a core part of being a cafe in Australia.

So I think that’s the biggest one, premium espresso. It’s not made by an automatic machine, the barista has to be skillful and talented, it’s not just pressing a button. It’s a true, respected profession in Australia. I’d love for us to be a part of the movement in educating people on how talented and dedicated premium baristas are. It’s a lot more complicated than people appreciate.

Well, I think people. Our team. The most important thing about building a brand is leading with experience. If you provide a wonderful experience, one that’s premium and magical, then people will tell their friends, and the best way to market is word of mouth. And with us, that’s how we built the brand. We had a really clear vision of what we stood for, the purpose, and we got inspired by Australian coffee culture, primarily Melbourne where I’m from, and our teams in the field are the face of the brand, the service we provide really reinforces the concept.

I think you can spend a lot of money on different things, but if it’s inauthentic, it doesn’t represent what you’re about. For us, it’s about providing premium quality coffee and tea, curated bespoke environments, and this notion of not being a customer but rather an intrinsic connection with a local. And if you do that right, people start talking about you. And if you create things that are aesthetically pleasing, people will use those photographs on social media, which is natural amplification we’ve benefitted from.

I think you just gotta respect the lines. It’s not easy, because when you’re really passionate about something, you can vent and be more direct with family, because you’ve got that implicit love and care for each other that makes you feel like you can be more direct. And you’ve been through a lot with family that you can deal with it, but it was obviously a huge concept with a lot of people and with my parents when Andy was about to move across. But I knew Andy was the best for the job, and he’s so incredibly important as the custodian of the brand, the face of the organization and the culture.

We’ve played different roles - he’s been very respectful of the ways I want to push the business, and I’ve been probably not been as respectful, but certainly considerate of Andy’s experience in marketing, brand-building, partnerships, understanding how they should develop organically and grow. It’s been really terrific, worked really well. And the other thing that’s very different - Alexandra and I have very different skillsets and backgrounds. We didn’t get the same classes at university, but we’ve brought them together to create Bluestone. And I don’t think the company would be nearly as strong without all of us bringing together our different backgrounds. I’m proud of the job we’ve done with listening to each other, being respectful of each other’s backgrounds and points of view.

There’s couple of things. First of all, the product needs to be really good, every single time. The coffee, tea, the food offerings, all need to be made to order and fresh. Secondly, the service proposition - you need to have a team dedicated to providing fantastic service. That’s the hardest thing to do at scale, but you need to invest in relationships, in knowing the locals. And thirdly, creating beautiful spaces where people feel there’s an element where they can disconnect, where they can go socialize with someone.

I think a lot of businesses get 2 out of 3 right, or 1 out of 3 right, but to do all 3 right at scale, we call it “boutique at scale,” very few companies have achieved that in hospitality, let alone in the cafe world, where you can say “The product is amazing, the people are incredible, the space feels unique and like an escape.” We certainly haven’t perfected it, but that’s our mandate every day, along with our core tenets and values.

I think it’s sort of like the horse and cart equation. You don’t get access to capital unless you’re committed to a certain agenda, in our case, boutique at scale. I was very clear on what we were signing up for when we brought in investors. And we’ve so fortunate in that our investor is so focused on building the brand, and that they want measured growth. There’s always pressure when you have any investor - whether it’s your parents or a firm - you want to do your best, and not lose anyone’s money. But I feel the same amount of pressure from the first investor to now.

For us, we already knew the growth was coming, and we’re in a number of markets, with more staff, but with the investment, there came the opportunity to bring onboard more talent we’d never have had access to, and for me that’s incredible - I can learn from specialists in their fields. And rather than a few people doing everything, you can bring in true specialists, who can help make the business run better, provide better experiences for our locals, and help us build a successful company.

I think it’s review sites, which are terrific for growing brand awareness, but they are also challenging because they are asymmetrical. Someone can review our business, but we can’t review the customer. So sometimes when it’s asymmetrical, there is no accountability, you can hide behind a digital veil without recompense, that can be frustrating, because sometimes people can have a bias, writing about something that hasn’t gone perfectly versus something that’s been really really great. We did this research within our own team, asking who does reviews, and we asked whether people reviewed positively or negatively, and we found that people were more likely to write a negative thing than a positive one. And that means you’re constantly being evaluated every day, with a bent towards writing about something that hasn’t satisfied, versus something that’s fantastic.

And for me personally via my LinkedIn - I probably post at least once a week, twice a week. And then downloading our app, which you can find in the App Store, we’re always producing different specials and alerts and loyalty programs. Signing up for our email, we probably send it once or twice a week with new store openings, new products, today we’re announcing something absolutely massive for Earth Day - today if you bring in a reusable cup, any beverage is a dollar, and going forward it’s a 25 cent discount on any beverage, so that’s our real commitment to being more sustainable, thinking about your impact on the planet.

And we’re hopeful this is a real incentive to people bringing their own cup. And if you get a reusable Bluestone Lane cup whenever, you get the first drink of choice on the house, 25 cents off going forward. It’s a big part of healthy minds, healthy bodies, healthy communities. So those would be the best ways to hear more about what we’re doing, where we’re opening, and what we’re trying to achieve.

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